


Love in the Times of (Intergalactic) War

by MemeKonVLD (MemeKonYA)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Established Relationship, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Fluff and Humor, Interviews, M/M, POV Outsider, Post-Defeat of Zarkon, Self-Indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 06:50:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8435713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MemeKonYA/pseuds/MemeKonVLD
Summary: Lance: Oh, man. [I see him grow visibly excited here, leaning forward and putting his hands up— he’s big on gesticulating, as anyone who’s watched the pilots of Voltron host SNL a couple of months ago knows.] Space is vast. I know that’s not groundbreaking knowledge there, and everyone’s somewhat aware of it, but— being up there? traveling around space for years, and knowing we never even— we never even came near to touching upon a tenth of what’s out there? That’s cool, weird and scary all in one.





	

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

**_Love in the Times of (Intergalactic) War_ ** **_  
_ ** **By: Dana Blanco**

 

_ Varadero, Matanzas.  _

It’s late at night, half past eleven the last time I checked. I’ve been traveling for the better part of today, and can feel the fatigue overcoming my body. This is no time for sleep, however. 

I’m standing at the door of a medium-sized house, with a couple windows facing the street. The curtains are drawn but there’s dimmed light coming from inside.

I’m nervous, my heart beats like crazy. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people for this job that I love, people that I admire and people whom I’ve always wanted to converse with, but for some reason this is different (no offense to everyone else! I hope you’ll be able to understand). My palms are sweaty, so I dry them up on my pants as I psyche myself up to knock.

I hear voices from inside, muffled laughter. 

I take a deep breath. And knock.

Someone gets the door almost instantly. They’ve probably been waiting for me. We scheduled the interview a month ago, over the phone. At that time it seemed like an eternal wait, right now it feels like it all went by in the blink of an eye.

“Oh, hi! Dana, right? Come on in, we’ve been waiting for you,” Lance Suárez greets me.

Lance Suárez. I’m standing right there, before Lance Suárez, pilot of Voltron, 27 years old.

“Is that the reporter from— oh, hi,”  _ Keith Kogane _ , 27 years.    
  
This is reality, I remind myself, and shake both their hands, attempting to appear every bit as professional as I am.

I step inside. The house is warm, lived in; there are some clothes strewn around, and books and magazines on top of furniture. It’s not enough to feel messy, but definitely enough to tell they’re both settled into this place and life.

Like this, it’s hard to think that merely months ago these two men had been battling for the fate of the universe along with Katie Holt, Hunk Garrett and Takashi Shirogane (who have been all featured in the past two issues) unbeknownst to us all.

These five people— along Altean princess Allura and her advisor Coran, mainstays during this war— have fought for our lives and freedom, and stepping into this house makes me realize how young they are (younger than I am, even, which is certainly disconcerting). 

“Do you want to drink something?” Lance Suárez asks, voice candid and animated, every bit as if he considered us friends already; he walks up to the fridge. “We have… Soda. That’s it. Keith, dude, you drank my juice  _ again _ .”  
  
“ _ Our _ juice,” Keith Kogane replies, and I am treated to a glimpse of their private life for a few seconds as Lance cranes his neck to look at Keith, who is all smirks when he sits across me on an armchair.  
  
“Fine,” Suárez ends up agreeing, as if monumentally troubled by it. He delivers me a glass of bubbling soda with a couple of ice cubes, and plops down on the arm of Kogane’s seat. “You better get up before I do and buy me a jug for my breakfast, my man.”  
  
I try to hide a smile at their display of easy cohabitation and affection by looking around for my recorder. As I rummage through my bag, I hear them bicker and chuckle under their breath.  
  
“Okay,” I say, a bit under my breath, as I straighten up. “I’m ready for this. How about you?”   
  
“I was  _ born _ ready,” Lance Suárez tells me, dazzling, and Keith Kogane rolls his eyes and then looks at me as if telling me  _ see what I have to deal with? _ but affectionately leans against him. This will be a common occurrence during this interview. 

 

  
**I feel like I need to start with this by thanking you for all you’ve done for us.** **  
****  
** **Keith:** I don’t think we should be thanked. Anyone would’ve done what we did in our situation. All of us— Pidge (Katie Holt), Shiro, Hunk, Lance and I— we did what we had to.

**Lance:** I agree with Keith here. Not that hearing these kinds of things isn’t nice! [He laughs kind of awkwardly here.] But I feel— up there, everyone would’ve wanted to give their best. Everyone would’ve wanted to save their loved ones. And everyone else, obviously. Everybody wants to save the world, right?   
  
**Keith:** He's feeling heroic. We just watched Sky High. [I give a startled laugh at this, not expecting Keith Kogane’s brand of humor, but nevertheless appreciating it.]

 

**Well, then. I know you’ve said this all before in countless interviews and in guest appearances on TV shows, but I guess we’ll never get enough. Such is humanity. Can you tell us about space? The cool things? The scary things? The weird things?** **  
****  
****Lance:** Oh,  _ man _ . [I see him grow visibly excited here, leaning forward and putting his hands up— he’s big on gesticulating, as anyone who’s watched the pilots of Voltron host SNL a couple of months ago knows.] Space is vast. I know that’s not groundbreaking knowledge there, and everyone’s somewhat aware of it, but— being up there? traveling around space for years, and knowing we never even— we never even came near to touching upon a tenth of what’s out there? That’s cool, weird and scary all in one.  
**  
** **Keith:** A weird thing about space for me is sound. We all went to the Galaxy Garrison, we knew this, but up there it’s different. [He grimaces, and I wonder what kind of story lies behind that expression.]

**Lance:** Oh, yeah, that was freaky too. Another scary thing is time: there’s no concept of time that’s universal. We have hours, minutes, seconds—  
**  
****Keith:** —Alteans have ticks.  
**  
****Lance:** Yeah. And then there’s— all these theories. All these physics concepts and knowledge. I was up there thinking ‘maybe by the time we’re done there’ll be nothing left on Earth to come back to’. [His face falls momentarily, and it doesn’t escape Keith, who puts a reassuring hand on Lance’s knee.]  
**  
****Keith:** Turns out STEM still has a long way to go.  
**  
** **Lance:** Good thing we have Pidge and Hunk then, huh?

 

**What was it like being a paladin of Voltron? What was it like being at war with the Galra Empire? And how did you all cope with your huge responsibility? You were all children. Katie Holt was fourteen at the time of your disappearance.  
** **  
****Lance:** Well, the short answer to your first question is it was amazing. But also scary as shit. Wait. Can I say shit? [I assure him that he can, in fact, say “shit”.] To the second: it sucked. Royally.  
**  
****Keith:** Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t go with the abridged version here. Being a paladin… It was a huge responsibility, and yes it was terrifying, but it was also— [he looks at Lance there and a complicated dance of eyebrows between the two of them follows.]  
**  
****Lance:** A source of pride?  
**  
****Keith:** That. It was knowing we were giving our all for a cause that mattered more than anything else. Being in war with the Galra was— If there never comes a day when anyone has to face something like that again, it’ll still be too soon.    
  
[There follows a moment of silence in which both Lance and Keith look a little withdrawn. I try to respect this, and leave them to their musings.]  
**  
****Lance:** Coping was different for everyone. Hunk learned to make feasts out of alien foodstuff, Pidge stuck to taking apart and putting together all kinds of technology. She often worked on upgrades for our lions, made some serious improvements on them. Hunk helped her with that too, and sometimes it’d be them and their super complicated stuff alone in the labs for days on end until they’d come out. Keith here—    
  
**Keith:** Lance, _ no _ .  
**  
****Lance:** —Keith here trained like a madman, is what I was gonna say. [Only it very obviously wasn’t. If Keith’s aggressively red cheeks didn’t give me a hint, then the conspiratorial smile Lance shoots me would’ve done the trick.]   


**Keith:** Lance knitted.  
**  
****Lance:** No shame in that. I’m great with my needles. I became almost as known around the planets we visited for my knitting expertise than for my being a paladin. I made myself some sweet currency with some sick scarves in trade posts.    
  
[Keith rolls his eyes but smiles at this, and I can see fondness written all over his face.]  
**  
** **Keith:** We also had each other. We learned to rely on each other and be each other’s support and family up there. That was a very important part of coping, knowing that we weren’t alone.

**Lance:** Yes. Can’t stress that enough. On our own? We wouldn’t have lasted. It was being together that helped us the most. [His eyes shine suspiciously for a moment here, but then he gets an animated expression and he slaps Keith’s shoulder playfully.] Have we ever told anyone the food fight story?  
**  
****Keith:** I don’t think so?  
**  
****Lance:** Oh, boy. So, to form Voltron? Everyone needs to be connected as one. You need to become in tune with your fellow paladins and strive to find a same goal. And at first? We sucked. We sucked so bad. We tried about _everything_ to form Voltron and nothing worked. I’m talking things like forming a sort of cheering pyramid with our lions, here. Do you know what finally got us on the same page? A food fight.  
  
Coran got the great idea of cuffing us all together for a meal, so we would bond and learn to work as a team, and then _someone_ — and I’m not naming any names but… [he looks at Keith, an eyebrow raised] you know. _Someone_ got Allura so pissed, that she flung a sporkful of food at them—  
**  
****Keith:** That was _Pidge_!  
**  
****Lance:** And who started it, Mr. ‘Go loose Pidge’? Anyway, she flung a sporkful of food at Pidge, and suddenly all bets were off and we were just— flinging food at her and Coran, working together and having the most fun we’d had since arriving there. And _then_ we finally formed Voltron. 

[He smiles warmly, putting his arm around Keith.] It was moments like those that helped us.

 

**That’s certainly some story. I feel the need to ask about your Garrison days. What made you want to attend there? Also, I know you’ve reported before that you two were rivals of a sort. Can you tell me a little about that?  
** **  
****Keith:** I always liked the idea of space, since I was little. One of the homes I stayed at back when I was five or six had a sizeable library, and a lot of books on space. I couldn’t get most of the concepts or even the words then, but the pictures fascinated me. And then I carried that with me. And as I grew I also found that I wanted to be a pilot. That’s why I entered the program.    


**Lance:** I was pretty much the same. I had glow in the dark stars on my room’s ceiling, and I wanted to know what was out there. On our rivalry—  
**  
****Keith:** That was all Lance.  
**  
****Lance:** Yeah, I’ll admit at the beginning it was all me. There was this guy out there, and he was the best— best grades, best in the simulations, really popular with everyone despite not even trying— and I wanted to be that guy. [He smirks, and I can see the moment when he squeezes Keith’s shoulder lightly.] Or be  _ with _ that guy, as it turns out. But I felt really inadequate because no matter what I did, it didn’t seem like it was enough, so that turned into me fiercely trying to be better than Keith at everything and anything.  
**  
****Keith:** And then he dragged me into it. I didn’t— I didn’t really have a ton of friends, and I was never great at socializing or interacting with others— my best friend was  _ Shiro _ , and he was one of my instructors. And then suddenly I got thrown into space with this guy, and he was funny and capable, and  _ he hated me so much _ —    
**  
****Lance:** Hey, I didn’t  _ hate _ you.  
**  
****Keith:** I know that  _ now. _ [He squeezes Lance’s knee, not having moved his hand an inch since he put it there.] Anyway, Lance was suddenly there and I was so conflicted. I didn’t want to be  _ rivals _ with him, but I also didn’t want to  _ lose _ to him, and more than both of those, I felt weirdly good when Lance’s attention was all on me, even if it was to challenge me to do something stupid that I was gonna say yes to, anyway. It was better than the alternative of Lance turning that focus onto someone else.   
  
  


I feel my chest tighten with these admissions, and see that Lance hasn’t escaped them unscathed either, expression soft and tender.

It takes me a couple of minutes to find my voice after this one question, and here I feel closer to my goal with this interview, which makes me sweaty and nervous. 

I ask the pilots for a bathroom break, and Keith gives me directions. Straight through the hall, second door on the right. 

When I get there, I get the sensation of having gotten into some fancy hotel’s bathroom, only with a surplus of skincare products and a half-full laundry basket. 

Once again it dawns on me how surreal the whole situation is, and how privileged I am to have been granted this opportunity. I take my time in there to regroup myself, to splash some cold water on my face and tell my reflection on the mirror that this is happening and it’s going well. 

When I get back, Lance and Keith are still sitting on their armchair, but their heads are bent together, talking about something in hushed tones, both smiling.

I announce I am ready to go on, and they say they’re too. I start my recorder once again.   
  
  


**You two haven’t been at all quiet about the fact that you’re together. And I think nobody has yet forgotten, or will forget anytime soon to be honest, Lance Suárez’ marriage proposal on national TV. You haven’t given any statements about any of this after that, but when I approached you for the interview you gave me the okay to broach the subject. Thank you for that. I wanted to know how it all happened. How you two decided that even with the entire world watching this was what you wanted.** **  
**

**Lance:** Hey, no problem. We chose to say yes because Allura and Pidge have very high opinions of you as a professional, and thought you would be respectful.   
So— the proposal. [They both exchange a charged look.] Boy. I don’t think I thought that hard about it. It wasn’t some big statement for me, other than of the fact that I very much want to be Keith Kogane’s husband, and hopefully see his face when I wake up every day of my life— corny as it sounds. I’d had the ring forever, and right then I just thought _why not?_ which seems to be a running theme in my life. So I did it.   


**Keith:** And I said yes, because I am corny too, and I want this guy to race me to the door when guests are coming over, to fight me over the last of Hunk’s homemade cookies, and to make me scarves for the rest of my life. I didn’t care about the cameras, about the host, about the people on the other side of the screen. I cared about Lance baring himself to me. That was what mattered to me.    
And about being open about our relationship— have you met Lance? He can’t keep quiet about anything, have you seen his social media? I swear his twitter followers know more about him than I do.   


**Lance:** [He laughs.] Rude and uncalled for. But yes. And also— we spent years at war. Years of falling in love and making a relationship work while there was all this uncertainty surrounding us and while we fought together. We saw each other at death’s door way too many times. I guess for us it couldn’t have been any other way. We were ready for anything good or bad, because honestly? I probably wouldn’t know how to act like I’m not head over heels in love with this reckless guy even if I wanted to.  
**  
****Keith:** Neither would I.   
  
  


**Thanks for such an honest answer. My fiancée and I have watched the proposal clip that went viral dozens of times. I think if anything out there gives me hope, it's seeing people like you two finding love in situations so dire, and holding onto it with both hands.  
** **  
** **Keith:** Look, you made him blush. [He smirks at Lance. Lance covers his face. I laugh.]

 

**Onto my last questions: how are you adjusting to life back on Earth? What’s the same? What’s different? And what do you plan on doing from now on?**   
  
**Keith:** The cameras are  _ definitely _ new.  
**  
** **Lance:** _ Definitely. _ I used to kid about getting a parade when we came back, but I never expected this kind of recognition for some reason. That’s one of the main things that changed. Another one is we simply aren’t— we are not the same, you know? We were kids when we left, now we’re grownups. We own a house. A whole entire house of our own. 

**Keith:** There’s a lot of things that are the same, though. We are the same to each other. And we’re the same with the others. The beach is the same, or so Lance tells me. There’s the same old reruns on TV. All those small things are the same.

**Lance:** Yeah. And that’s good, grounding. That helps in adjusting. Sometimes I still wake up disoriented and think I’m up in the castleship, but I see out the window and go  _ oh _ . And as for what we’re planning to do— become pilots? It’s what we are, right Keith?   
  
**Keith:** Yeah, I don’t see myself doing anything else. But I think we’re taking some long vacations first.

**Lance:** Oh, are we?    
  
**Keith:** I’m not marrying you and then rushing off on some mission, Lance.

**Lance:** Vacations it is.  
  
  


That’s when I decide to stop my interview. I’ve asked all I wanted to know, and it’s dark and silent outside. 

They both see me to the door, as we make small conversation on the publication schedule. Keith is apparently not big on keeping up with their media appearances, but Lance is. 

I smile at them and thank them again for giving me the opportunity to interview them in their home. 

The last thing I see before I turn around is their hands firmly clasped together.

I walk up to my rented car with a smile on my face.

I am fairly sure that by the time this issue comes out, we’ll have already heard wedding bells for these two defenders of the universe.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [ Come and hang out with me on tumblr!](http://memekon.tumblr.com)


End file.
